'Mammoth' new air capture plant will suck up 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year in Iceland

[PorkChopSandwiches]

By Jill Pole with Reuters • Updated: 28/06/2022

Construction is due to begin on Wednesday on what could become the world's biggest plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air and deposit it underground.

The Swiss company behind the nascent green technology is start-up Climeworks AG, which says its direct air capture (DAC) plant will be built in Iceland in 18-24 months, and will have have capacity to suck 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from the air.

This may be just a sliver of the 36 billion tonnes of energy-related CO2 emissions produced worldwide last year.


But it is a 10-fold increase from Climeworks' existing DAC plant, currently the world's largest, and a leap in scale for a technology scientists this year said is "unavoidable" if the world is to meet climate change goals.

The "mammoth" plant will have have capacity to suck 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from the air.
The new "mammoth" plant will contain around 80 large blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix then mixes with water and injects underground - where a chemical reaction turns it to rock.


The process will be powered by a nearby geothermal energy plant.

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This plant captures CO2 from the air to 'reverse' climate change

Co-CEO Christoph Gebald said once this plant launches, Climeworks intends to build a far bigger facility capturing roughly half a million tonnes of CO2 per year - and then replicate multiple plants of that size, backed by project financing, towards the end of the decade.



'Mammoth' was part-financed by a 600 million Swiss Franc (€594 million) financing round Climeworks announced in April. The firm also sells among the world's most expensive carbon removal credit - costing up to €1,000 per tonne - to buyers including Microsoft, Audi and Boston Consulting Group.

"It's the cost of scaling up," Gebald told Reuters. "This is, so to say, the investment we have to do as a company to move forward."

The world currently has 18 direct air capture facilities, according to the International Energy Agency. US oil firm Occidental also plans to launch a large-scale DAC facility, in late-2024, to collect 1 million tonnes per year of CO2.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said energy-intensive and costly technologies like DAC will be needed to remove CO2 on a large scale in the coming decades, to limit global warming to 1.5C and avoid increasingly severe climate impacts.

Heleen De Coninck, an IPCC author and professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, said DAC must be powered by CO2-free energy to be useful, and should not replace urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

[KevinD]

They gonna kill all their plants....

[Teh One Who Knocks]

They gonna kill all their plants....

What if they can't shut it off and it sucks all the C02 out of the air and kills all the plants in the world?

[PorkChopSandwiches]

[lost in melb.]

What if they can't shut it off and it sucks all the C02 out of the air and kills all the plants in the world?

Don't panic, it would take one million years to suck out 1 years worth of CO2 output

[KevinD]

Don't panic, it would take one million years to suck out 1 years worth of CO2 output

Talk about pulling something outta your arse,

Where did you get that info?
If I understand you correctly, you're stating that there is a million years of CO2 produced every year?

[lost in melb.]

Talk about pulling something outta your arse,

Where did you get that info?
If I understand you correctly, you're stating that there is a million years of CO2 produced every year?

Lol. I meant the machine pulls out one millionth of the C02 that the World produces.

...and will have have capacity to suck 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from the air.

This may be just a sliver of the 36 billion tonnes of energy-related CO2 emissions produced worldwide last year.

[deebakes]

[Godfather]

Lol. I meant the machine pulls out one millionth of the C02 that the World produces.

...and will have have capacity to suck 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from the air.

This may be just a sliver of the 36 billion tonnes of energy-related CO2 emissions produced worldwide last year.

If there is a sliver of hope, Iceland's C02 emissions are about 3.9m tons/year, so this will reduce the country's own C02 emissions by almost 1% which I guess is something especially given Iceland is top 20 in terms of C02 emissions per capita in the world.


On the other hand... $1000 per ton doesn't seem feasible unless it gets drastically cheaper/more efficient as you scale up (which I suppose could be the case, it is for most industries). If the US emits 5 billion tons of C02/year and if you want to even reduce that by 10% using this tech it would cost $250 billion, which I doubt anyone is going to green-light. But again, maybe that cost comes down and this tech gets better. I don't really see people or countries changing their habits and much of the world still needs to industrialize, so perhaps there's a glimmer of hope we can science the problem away

[lost in melb.]

If there is a sliver of hope, Iceland's C02 emissions are about 3.9m tons/year, so this will reduce the country's own C02 emissions by almost 1% which I guess is something especially given Iceland is top 20 in terms of C02 emissions per capita in the world.


On the other hand... $1000 per ton doesn't seem feasible unless it gets drastically cheaper/more efficient as you scale up (which I suppose could be the case, it is for most industries). If the US emits 5 billion tons of C02/year and if you want to even reduce that by 10% using this tech it would cost $250 billion, which I doubt anyone is going to green-light. But again, maybe that cost comes down and this tech gets better. I don't really see people or countries changing their habits and much of the world still needs to industrialize, so perhaps there's a glimmer of hope we can science the problem away

Yes exactly. Only through pilots can you develop the tech to scale these things up. I think we can all remember when solar power was fiendishly expensive in the early days.

Hopefully we won't need too much of this tech in the future, but it's good to have as a backup. Especially as we haven't hit the ceiling yet for greenhouse gas production. Good point about the relationship between Greenland and its own emissions.